Field of the Disclosure
The disclosure relates to the field of Internet technologies, and in particular, to a system and method for acquiring, processing, and updating global information.
Description of the Related Art
With the rapid development of e-commerce globalization, cross-regional e-commerce transactions are becoming increasingly popular and frequent.
Services deployed in a large-scale cross-regional distributed e-commerce scenario generally face global information update requirements. The update process must be efficient and information must be kept globally consistent, all the while maintaining continuous services.
Consider, as examples, IP address translation configuration data in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service or global information of an international e-commerce platform such as eBay, Amazon, etc.
By using a routing table, in the process of performing an e-commerce transaction, user data operations at an Internet Data Center (IDC) may be involved. In order to quickly respond to a user's data operation requests and guarantee consistency of global information, international e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba, Amazon and eBay may allocate several IDCs in multiple regions in a distributed manner, assign the nearest IDC according to the location of the user, record the IDC to which the user belongs into the routing table, and fulfill a user's data operation request based on the routing table. In this manner, the platforms may serve users in various regions and ensure that all data operations of a user are directed to the appropriate IDC.
In practice, however, users may perform cross-regional data operations. For example, a user may travel to another city on business or may immigrate to another country. To quickly respond to a user's data operation requests and ensure global data consistency, the platforms must re-assign the IDC associated with the user and update the routing table.
Current techniques for updating a routing table involve the use of a management control system (MCS) of the e-commerce platform which pushes an updated new version routing table to application servers in various regions. The application server, after receiving the new version of the routing table, correspondingly returns an update confirmation notice to the MCS and suspends serving a user's data operation request. After acknowledging that all application servers in the regions have received the new version routing table, the MCS sends a routing table enabling instruction to the application servers. The application servers then resume normal services after receiving the enable instruction. Thus, the application servers in different regions serve users by using the unified routing table, ensuring consistency of the global data.
However, using the above technique, application servers spend a significant amount of time acquiring a completely new version of the routing table (which, itself, contains a large amount of data). Due to large differences in environmental conditions, such as network links and physical distances (e.g., from the MCS to the application servers in the regions), it is common that application servers in some regions may have received the new version of the routing table, while application servers in other regions are still in the process of receiving the new version of the routing table. Therefore, it takes a significant amount of time for the all the application servers to complete the routing table update. Moreover, to ensure global consistency of the routing table, during the entire process of updating the routing table, all of the application servers are unable to serve the users. While described primarily in the context of a routing table update, in other large-scale cross-regional update scenarios of global information, the problems of low update efficiency and prolonged service unavailability still exist.
Therefore, as described above, current techniques for updating global information are inefficient and cause numerous problems resulting in services being unavailable for a significant amount of time during the updating of global information.